Program Variability

Our research seeks to advance program variability middleware technology for improved application construction, deployment, and maintenance.

We explore program variability with the expectation that externalizing "business rules" from core applications has many advantages. Externalization makes policies accessible and explicit, whether conceived from within an organization or mandated externally by a regulatory agency. It increases application understanding and consistency of business practices. It lowers the cost of maintenance and empowers stakeholders with the ability to adjust application behavior.

Products

Papers

• "Business Users and Program Variability: Bridging the Gap", Isabelle Rouvellou, Lou Degenaro, Judah Diament, Achille Fokoue,and Sam Weber. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Software Reuse, July, 2004, Madrid, Spain.

• "Improving Performance with Application-Level Caching", Louis Degenaro, Arun Iyengar, and Isabelle Rouvellou. In Proceedings of the SSGRR 2001 International Conference on Advances in Infrastructure for Electronic Business, Science, and Education on the Internet , L'Aquila, Italy, August 2001

• "Combining different business rules technologies: A rationalization", Isabelle Rouvellou, Lou Degenaro, Hoi Chan, Kevin Rasmus, Benjamin N. Grosof, Dave Ehnebuske, and Barbara McKee. Presented at the workshop Best-Practices in Business Rule Design and Implementation, held at OOPSLA 2000, 15-19 October 2000, in Minneapolis, Minnesota USA. Presentation slides.

• "Extending Business Objects with Business Rules", Isabelle Rouvellou, Louis Degenaro, Kevin Rasmus, David Ehnesbuske, and Barbara McKee. In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Technology of Object-Oriented Languages and Systems ( TOOLS Europe 2000), Mont Saint-Michel/ St-Malo, France, Juin, 2000. IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 238-249.

• "A Middleware System Which Intelligently Caches Query Results", Louis Degenaro, Arun Iyengar, Ilya Lipkind, and Isabelle Rouvellou. In Joseph Sventek and Geoffrey Coulson, editors, Proceedings IFIP/ACM International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms, New York , NY, USA April 2000 (Middleware 2000); Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1795, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp. 24-44, April, 2000.

• "Externalizing Business Rules from Enterprise Applications: An Experience Report", Isabelle Rouvellou, Louis Degenaro, Kevin Rasmus, David Ehnesbuske, and Barbara McKee. In Practitioner Reports in the OOPSLA '99 Companion, 1999. Presentation slides.

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Questions and/or comments about this project can be directed to Lou Degenaro (email: degenaro(at)us(dot)ibm(dot)com) or Isabelle Rouvellou (email: rouvellou(at)us(dot)ibm(dot)com).